Posts Tagged ‘sidney poitier’

1967 is often considered something of a watershed for cinema, the year in which the counter-cultural sensibilities of the sixties began to seep through into the mainstream and presage of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’, with the commercial and critical success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde paving the way. It was also a busy year for Sidney Poitier, the top box office star of that year and the first black male to win the Academy Award in 1963, who starred in three pictures that purported to deal with serious social and racial fissures of the time, to varying degrees of success. In addition to school-set melodrama To Sir, with Love, Poitier took centre stage in two other self-consciously culturally significant efforts that yearned for Oscar attention.

The first was In the Heat of the Night, a sweaty, raw but ultimately pat police procedural that the actor still cites as his favourite work, its most famous line (“They call me MISTER Tibbs!”) remaining well-known and much-parodied to this day. The second was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a toothless Stanley Kramer prestige picture, which boasted the final pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and little else. Both were touted at the time as laudable films that wouldn’t shy away from the issue of race, thrusting Sidney Poitier as they did into overwhelmingly ‘white’ environments – a prison cell in a small Southern town, the dinner table of an upper-class liberal family – and having him triumph over backwardness and bigotry. The films were feted with awards (In the Heat of the Night winning for Best Picture), and praised for their forthrightness. But Poitier’s career was never to scale such heights again.

Viewing these films retrospectively in this allegedly ‘post-racial’ clime, it’s tempting to see the outwardly progressive agendas of both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as bald and condescending; thinly-veiled attempts to cash in on liberal guilt and play it as straight entertainment. Granted, we have to watch these films in the context of the era they were made. But even then, they were both, to some extent, preaching to the converted: by the end of each film, a stubbornly antagonistic white male (Rod Steiger in Heat, Spencer Tracy in Dinner) has become reconciled to Poitier’s character’s inherent worth and value, this staggering feat apparently only possible by solving a local murder or enduring several hours’ worth of embarrassment in front of your girlfriend’s parents. By the same token Poitier is idealised to a ridiculous degree. He’s the street-smart homicide detective amongst a gaggle of idiot racists in In the Heat of the Night, and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner his character is deified to such laughable heights (an internationally-respected doctor who lectures in Hawaii and Switzerland) it derails the film almost entirely.

Both films never transcend the narrow trappings of their ‘social issues’ agenda. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, is ultimately the weaker effort. Like Kramer’s The Defiant Ones before it, Poitier is taken to be emblematic of all African-Americans firstly, and a character in his own right secondly, only existing as a social phenomena that must be ‘solved’ by the film’s self-righteous protagonists. At least In the Heat of the Night, which was to spawn two sequels featuring Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs, makes attempts at raw exuberance and grim violence, even if its strident rhetoric would’ve merely reaffirmed its largely liberal audience’s pre-existing beliefs. Considering blaxploitation would erupt as a sub-genre just four years later with the release of the incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, Poitier’s 1967 pair come off as overly mannered and woefully naive. Both should take comfort, though, in the fact that neither are as austere and mincing as Paul Haggis’ insipid race-relations drama and Worst Best Picture Oscar winner ever, 2004’s Crash, which propounds the notion that having Sandra Bullock fall down the stairs will cure her, and by extension the whole of Los Angeles, of their intractable racial prejudices.

Race continues to be a divisive and trenchant issue in contemporary American society, as the wrongful arrest of Henry Gates, Glenn Beck’s continued lunacy at Fox News and ex-President Carter’s recent claims of racism against Barack Obama will testify. Invariably these issues will always reach our cinema screens. Few attempt something genuinely radical; the ones that do flare heated, but often productive debate, by conceptualising people of different races with appropriate individuality and dignity. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is the obvious example here. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t shower the rest of the more ham-fisted attempts with Oscars. But 1967 was a watershed for cinema, in that it opened the channels of racial discourse. And however cloying some of the end results seem today, it would be a grave mistake to consign these issues to a past conceived as either ‘dead’ or ‘irrelevant’.

The first all-black casted film, The Homesteader, was made by novelist Oscar Micheaux in 1919. It dealt with the race tensions and inequalities of the period, a theme that would continue to be pervasive in black cinema. Of the 500 or so ‘race movies’ – films made for black people by black people up until about 1950, only around 100 have survived, due in part to their existence outside the protection of Hollywood.

Perhaps the most notable black pioneer in cinema is Sidney Poitier. In 1963, Poitier became the first black actor to win an Academy Award for his part in Lilies of the Field (though James Baskett was awarded an honorary Oscar for his role in Song of the South and Hattie McDaniel won a Best Supporting Actress Award for Gone With the Wind). He was regarded as a critically and commercially successful actor, starring in films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! Poitier was savvy enough to choose roles that not only paid off financially, but roles that also challenged black stereotypes of the time. He also had a successful career behind the camera with a clutch of directorial efforts. For his contribution to cinema, Poitier was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 2001 and more recently received a Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

An important chapter of black cinema is the blaxploitation genre of the 1970s. Led by films such as the original Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the blaxploitation films usually starred black casts who, through brain and brawn, outwit The Man. Whilst some found the films empowering – Spike Lee said of Sweet Sweetback, “…[it] gave us all the answers we needed. This was an example of how to make a film, a real movie, distribute it yourself, and most important, get paid”- others, such as the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Urban League, criticised the genre’s crass stereotyping (such as pimps or drug-dealing characters) and the movement waned by the end of the decade.

The legacy of blaxploitation lives on, most notably in the work of Quentin Tarantino. Kill Bill, Death Proof and especially his masterpiece Jackie Brown (which starred stalwart of the original movement, Pam Grier); all owe a creative debt to the blaxploitation genre. Shaft was remade in 2000 and the movement influenced films as diverse as American Gangster to Austin Powers. For better or worse, blaxploitation also influenced the iconic style of the ‘gangster’ image adopted by artists such as Snoop Dogg, Ice T and 50 Cent.

Perhaps the most important black director of recent years is Spike Lee. A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of Art, Lee has helmed almost fifty major films (as well as numerous advertisement campaigns, most famously for Nike). He has also directed videos for Prince and the late Michael Jackson. Lee’s signature film, Do the Right Thing, was nominated for two Academy Awards, though not Best Picture, to the chagrin of the director and many others. Deemed controversial upon it’s released in 1989, several jumpy white reviewers incorrectly predicted that black audiences would be incited to riot after seeing the film. Of course, no violence took place and the film has gone on to be rightly heralded as a modern classic.

Lee is nothing if not outspoken, both on-screen and off. While his films deal with issues of race, media and society, Lee himself has been a strident critic of the NRA and Charlton Heston, the actions of the US government post-Katrina and racist right-wingers. An avid sports fan, Lee is preparing a documentary on Michael Jordan as well as a sequel to his 2006 thriller, Inside Man.

I noted whilst researching this article that of the top twenty highest grossing film stars of recent years (in a survey published by Esquire magazine) only two were black – Will Smith and Eddie Murphy (furthermore, only five were female). No Academy Awards have been won by a person of African origin in the last two years. In spite of the boundaries broken by Micheaux, Poitier and Lee, Hollywood, at least, is far from an equal opportunities workplace. Thankfully, independent cinema showcases much more black talent, which is why events such as the Black Filmmaker’s International Film Festival are so important.